No “Grito” on video

November 15, 2006

It’s amazing what is not available on video for use in the classroom.

Texas kids have to study the “Grito de Dolores” in the 7th grade — the “Cry from Dolores” in one translation, or the “Cry of Pain” in another (puns in Spanish! Do kids get it?). Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo made the speech on September 16, 1810, upon the news that Spanish authorities had learned of his conspiracy to revolt for independence. The revolution had been planned for December 8, but Hidalgo decided it had to start early.

This date is celebrated in Mexico as Independence Day. Traditionally the President of Mexico issues an update on the Grito, after the original bell that Father Hidalgo used is rung, near midnight.

Hidalgo himself was captured by the Spanish in 1811, and executed.

It’s a great story. It’s a good speech, what little we have of it (Hidalgo used no text, and we work from remembered versions).

Why isn’t there a good 10- to 15-minute video on the thing for classroom use? Get a good actor to do the speech, it could be a hit. Where is the video when we need it?Father Hidalgo issues the Grito

Statue of Father Hidalgo in Dolores, Mexico

4 Comments | Education, History, History video sources, TAKS, TEKS, Texas | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

New push for history education in Ho Chi Minh City

October 28, 2006

Many of us still remember it as Saigon.

In holding on to history, people need to start somewhere. To cure ignorance of Vietnamese history, Ho Chi Minh City officials are posting banners honoring women in Vietnam history, according to that story at Viet Q.

History poster in Ho Chi Minh City

Citizens view a poster relating the role of women in Vietnam history.

Would posting history in the street work in Dallas? In Houston? In Chicago, New York, Los Angeles or Boise?

Last summer, on the way to Scout summer camp, Troop 355 from Duncanville, Texas, stopped for a night in Memphis, Tennessee. After dinner (at Hard Rock Cafe, where we discovered the waitress had an Eagle Scout boyfriend and the waiter was an ex-Scout who still loves backpacking), I noticed there on Beale Street a chunk of history required for Texas students, in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS): Across the street from Hard Rock Cafe was the historical marker for the site of Ida Tarbell’s newspaper reporting days. No, I couldn’t interest a single kid in walking across the street to read the marker, though Ida Tarbell tends to show up on tests with some regularity.

I wonder where the Ho Chi Minh City officials got the idea?

Hard Rock Cafe, Memphis

(The Ida Tarbell historic marker is just out of this picture, to the right)

1 Comment | Current History, History, Pedagogy, Public education, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

300 million

October 17, 2006

At 7:46 a.m. EDT the population of the U.S. is projected to hit 300 million people.

What sort of lesson plans are available for such an event?

Is there room for pondering such issues under the state’s education standards for social studies?

2 Comments | Current History, History, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Nobel successes hide science education problems

October 6, 2006

U.S. scientists swept the Nobel prizes in science this year — in Medicine or Physiology, in Chemistry, and in Physics. I noted earlier that I suspected most Nobel winners this year would, again, be products of public schools. (I have not yet got biographies of each winner to confirm that.)

Beneath the successes at the top simmers a lot of pending gloom, however. P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula points to concerns among science educators about a huge gap between our top achievers and the rest of us. He cites an Associated Press story, and it in turn calls up the 2002 survey by the National Science Foundation that found woeful ignorance of basic science stuff among U.S. kids and adults.

Basic research and practical applications of science drove U.S. economic achievement through the end of the 19th century and through most of the 20th century. China and India far outpace the U.S. in producing new engineers today, however, and European research centers simply have greater scientific capacity in many areas, especially since the end of the plans for a U.S. superconducting supercollider particle accelerator, more than a decade ago.

Rhodes Scholar, former U.S. Senator, NBA and NCAA basketball all-star Bill Bradley once said that it’s easier to get to the number 1 position than it is to stay there. The ascendancy of the U.S. in science and engineering achievement occurred decades ago. Without serious, planned work to stay there, some other nation will take over the lead in each area of science, probably within the next 20 years — perhaps within the next decade.

I’ll try to find links, but my memory brings up a couple of studies that show that in 4th grade, U.S. kids are at the head of the pack in science achievement. By 8th grade, they start to fall behind the leaders. By 12th grade, U.S. kids are far behind almost all kids in other industrialized nations. Something we do wrong between 4th grade and 12th grade is sapping the competitive ability of the nation. We need to fix it.

Dr. Myers has some suggestions well worth considering.

1 Comment | Education, Public education, Science, State school boards, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Ten best presentations – readers’ choice

October 3, 2006

KnowHR had a great post a while ago on the “ten best presentations ever,” mostly pertaining to IT and other technology. I noted it on this blog, and I also wrote in with some recommendations for other presentations that ought to be in a ten best presentations list.

Well, KnowHR has done another list of readers’ choices, including one of mine, perhaps the most controversial one.

It’s a useful list. Educators may want to make a special note of the presentation on creativity in education by Sir Ken Robinson.

Someone will always grouse about rankings of things that are difficult to compare, but I find that making such rankings is helpful to students in studying a subject, and such lists emphasize what is important to know when they refer to historical events. The rankings focus on two important facets: The effects of the event, which sometimes cascade over a great deal of time or great distances, and the relative importance of other events.

The Texas Education Agency ranks events in U.S. history, picking a eleven that are important enough students should know the dates by year. Here are the years; can you determine the events to be remembered?

  • 1607
  • 1776
  • 1787
  • 1803
  • 1861-1865
  • 1877
  • 1898
  • 1914-1918
  • 1929
  • 1941-1945
  • 1957
  • (and I would have sworn there was a date for the end of the Cold War, but I can’t find it just now at the TEA website . . . I list the date as 1991, the crumbling of the Soviet Union, which was officially dead at midnight, December 31, 1991) .

1957 stumped me a bit — which historic event was supposed to be the one Texas wanted? Once I learned the trick, I wondered whether 1969 wouldn’t have been a better choice.  (You can check out the link to figure out the event and the year — or pose the question in comments.)

In any case, check out the list at KnowHR. What’s been left off?

5 Comments | History, Lesson plans, Pedagogy, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Two things: Economics

September 24, 2006

You can look up “meme” if you need to or want to. I won’t clutter your life with an explanation here.

I recently learned of the Two Things meme, again courtesy of WordPress’s tags tools. It appears to have been most developed by Glenn Whitman, at California State University – Northridge (also here).

Two Things about economics:

  • One: Incentives matter.
  • Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Arnold Kling at Liberty Fund’s Econ Library is uncomfortable with the claims. Tim Worstall at Tech Central less so.

Neither of the two things in economics will do a whit for a student on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). For TAKS, basic economics isn’t as important as the political end of the scale. For TAKS, Texas kids need to know what the Texas Education Agency thinks important about economics, which is:

1. Economic systems are classified as:

  • Traditional or subsistence agriculture;
  • Command or Demand (usually totalitarian government)
  • Free market or free enterprise (usually a democracy)
  • Mixed system

2. Countries with free enterprise economic systems have the highest per capita income, GNP, educational levels, and lowest infant mortality rates.

No kidding. The second point is very interesting to me, considering that Cuba has the highest literacy rate and lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas. Clearly these are not hard and fast rules — the exceptions should be very interesting.

5 Comments | Economics, TAKS, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Economics of globalization — will it work?

September 22, 2006

Economics sits on the back burner in the Bathtub these days.

Something interesting brews in international economics. South America had been a place of triumph for the Chicago school, with great success in turning a right-wing dictatorship into a free market system in Chile, for example, and free market inroads in Venezuela. But what happened in the past ten years? Elections in Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile did not run as some Chicago school advocates may have hoped.

So, recently I’ve been looking at some of the comments of Joseph Stiglitz, whose views are not always perfectly in accord with the line out of Washington. Stiglitz headed Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, spent time at the World Bank, and won a Nobel.

Maybe we should listen to him. From the University Channel at Princeton:

Lee C. Bollinger, Tina Rosenberg, Nancy Birdsall, George Soros, and Joseph E. Stiglitz discuss solutions for some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as debt, unfair trade, the “resource curse”, the need to curb harmful emissions and world poverty

Image Streaming video (length: 1:44:43)

Panelists:
– Lee C. Bollinger, President, Columbia University (Host)
– Tina Rosenberg, Editorial Writer, The New York Times (Moderator)
– Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development
– George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Institute; Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC
– Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist; University Professor at Columbia University; Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought; Executive Director of Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University; former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton; former Chief Economist of the World Bank

(taped September 18, 2006, at Columbia University)

In particular, high school kids in Texas show skepticism towards the free-market economics pushed in many forums. Especially for kids with family and economic ties in Mexico, Central and South America, there can be serious cognitive dissonance with what they see in the textbook. I have found it very effective to discuss alternative views, and to find high quality sources of information. I’m considering adding Stiglitz to my list, which is a short one at the moment, populated chiefly by the modern Hernando DeSoto.

(I found this via shizaam.)

1 Comment | Current History, Economics, Freedom - Economic, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Revisionism of current history, 9/11/2001

September 17, 2006

There is a “carnival” of economics posts that I rarely link to because I find the topics often far out on the right wing end of the scale, offensively so to me, the Economics and Social Policy Carnival.

In the current issue of the Carnival there is this post from :textbook evaluator, discussing complaints about history texts and their treatment of the attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and the aftermath. It is a serious, thought-provoking post. It raises deep questions about the purpose of a history text:

What dismays me most about the arguments over “what history should be covered” or “how it should be covered,” is that we never arrive at the thought that kids themselves should “do” history. We don’t trust our teachers or kids enough to give them many sides or perspectives on an issue, and let them try to make sense of it. We don’t teach them historical thinking skills: we instead argue over what “truths” to feed them.

Criticism of texts of such high quality is in short supply — and, considering the process for textbook approval in Texas, we need a lot more, high quality criticism of texts.

I may pay more attention to the Economics and Social Policy Carnival from now on.

3 Comments | Current History, Economics, Education, TAKS, TEKS, Textbook Selection, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Map projection lesson planning material

September 6, 2006

Ooooh. I love maps. I like teaching about them. Projection is an issue for middle schoolers, though — they seem not quite to grasp why it’s important to show Greenland smaller than Australia.

Well, that’s an issue I have not reconciled.

But I did stumble across some cool animations on the Fuller Projection, such as that shown below.

Go see. And see an animation here.

Update: In comments, spatulated at A Bit Tasty lists a source for a poster of the Earth done in Fuller Projection.

2 Comments | Geography - Physical, Lesson plans, Maps, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

More maps!

August 23, 2006

This is too good to leave in comments.  A reader named Chris commented on my earlier post about NOAA maps with a list of sources.

Humans generally take in information much faster visually, and retain it longer.  Maps provide a key tool for teaching history.  The more the better, I think.

Chris wrote:

The NOAA data center is one of many really neat places to get data, images, and materials. Here are a few more (and let me know if you want more on any one topic, as I collect links like these – and happen to work in the field!):

Earth Observatory Science site. Free! One of the best sites out there.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

Visible Earth:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/

Find Space Objects! Easy views from your location. Cool.
http://www.heavens-above.com/

Space weather/environment. Great insight into the sun and upper atmosphere.
http://spaceweather.com/
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/

Elevation, land use, maps, and lots of other GIS data:
http://seamless.usgs.gov/

Learning technologies. Some fantastic educational materials:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/index.html

Direct Readout Data. Great images.
http://directreadout.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Distributed Active Archive Center.
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/www/

More great free images.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Cheers!
Chris

Leave a Comment » | Education, Geography - Physical, History, Maps, TEKS, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Texas adds financial literacy standards

August 15, 2006

Teachers in Texas got notice in the past week of the financial literacy standards the State Board of Education approved over the summer. There is a push on nationally to add these standards in every state. The Department of the Treasury has been working to push such standards and create materials for teachers to use in classrooms.

Most Texas school districts were working on such a curriculum, I think — every one I checked was, if that’s any indication.

Odd side note: The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) provided meetings with the Department of the Treasury and guidance for state school boards doing what Texas did — but the Texas SBOE dropped out of that organization over an anti-bullying campaign also promulgated by NASBE. The problem was that NASBE’s program said homosexual kids should not be bullied, and the Texas board members disagreed. Yes, I know, there is no rational way to defend that decision, but there you go. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Business Ethics, Economics, Education, State school boards, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Atomic anniversaries

August 7, 2006

This week marks the 61st anniversaries of the U.S. dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

This is the only event that occasionally causes me to wish for school in early August. Marking the anniversaries in a U.S. history class could be a useful exercise. Texas’ TEKS require students to know a bit about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and especially his reasoning behind the decision. To get there in an orderly fashion, and to keep kids captivated by this most interesting part of recent history, I think a class needs to lay the background with the end of the war in Europe (especially D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge) with troops hoping to go home to the U.S. and being diverted to the Pacific, the background of the U.S.’s “island-hopping” strategy, especially the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carnage that was required to take the islands, and the background of the Manhattan Project, from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt through the secret cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Trinity Project at White Sands, the training of the bombers at Wells Wendover, Nevada, and the World War I service of Harry Truman himself. It’s a fascinating history that, the Texas tests show and my classroom experience confirms, students know very little about.

As with the misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which I reported earlier today, this history of atom bombs informs us of policy choices available and necessary in our current dealings with North Korea, Iran, Ukraine and Russia, among other nations.

Japanese foundations sponsor trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for U.S. reporters, and there used to be one for high school teachers, too. It’s a history I lived with for a decade trying to get a compensation bill for downwind victims of fallout from our atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada. I wish more people knew the stories.

5 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Curricula, Harry Truman, History, Nuclear weapons, Science, TAKS, Technology, TEKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

1984: History of technology

August 3, 2006

A nicely-written blog, “I Had an Idea This Morning,” had a piece by Anne from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York in the past week about just how far off the mark was George Orwell’s novel 1984 in its portrayal of the use of information devices, “1984 vs. the Blog: Orwell’s Big Blooper.” Instead of the government having a monopoly on the publication of news to be used to suppress the people, the people have fractured such distribution especially with the use of the internet. I find especially thought-provoking the last two paragraphs of Anne’s piece:

Looking back, it almost seems like the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union were the fruit of a never-to-be-repeated phase in the evolution of communications technology. For a brief, horrific period, governments had total control over powerful tools—television and radio—that they could use to communicate with their citizens. The internet, by design, makes such centralized control impossible.

But does that make us safe from groups of super evil mean crazy people? It’s been widely observed that new technologies—from gunpowder to nuclear fusion—have historically been harnessed to serve malevolent ends. Why should communications technology be any different? While mass communication technology helped enable the rise of totalitarian regimes that laid down the law, the internet is pretty good at empowering destructive entities that work outside the law—terrorists, for one. Just as the new technology has given us a billion little blogs and news sites and tv channels and video streams, it’s also giving us thousands of new, super organized hate-based groups to worry about.

The actual year 1984 is a generation gone, and we don’t see exactly the evils that Orwell wrote about. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Economics, History, Lesson plans, TAKS, Technology, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Textbook fight in Texas:Watch carefully!

July 17, 2006

Texas textbooks suffer from political wrangling by the state’s school board, which has little else to do with the texts but wrangle over what is in them and why. News suggests the board, recently fortified with primary election wins by extremely conservative, anti-public school forces, now will try to use the texts to change curricula statewide.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the Texas State Board of Education (Texas SBOE) will go after English literature in the next round of text approvals: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/metropolitan/4024620 Reporter Jane Elliott wrote:

“Many on the board want to replace a student-centered curriculum that calls on students to use their own attitudes and ethics to interpret texts with teacher-centered instruction that emphasizes the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

“It was a fight social conservatives on the board lost in 1997, when moderates and liberals adopted the curriculum for all subjects. Now, with social conservatives expected to have a majority on the board for the first time after the November elections, the plan to rewrite the English standards is viewed by some as the opening shot in an effort to put a conservative imprint on the state’s curriculum.”

English does not lend itself much to political manipulation, generally. There is a set of classic literature that Texas teachers use, basically the same set teachers in other states use. It is possible that this change in process could help English instruction. Past experience suggests this is a stalking horse issue for the board to develop voting blocs and strategies to go after the content of U.S. history courses and biology courses later. Inherent dangers in these battles include the watering down of texts to the point that they are dishwater — deadly dull for students, and deadly to the teaching of the subjects.

Dr. Diane Ravitch, now of New York University, formerly the Assistant Secretary of Education for Research in the administration of George H. W. Bush, argues that both left and right share blame for bad textbooks as a result of these fights, in her book, The Language Police. I am most familiar with the Holt Rinehart Winston (HRW) series, The American Nation, from using it for three years (we were using an earlier edition of the book shown in the link).

The books must mention a broad range of specific topics and people. All of the approved history books suffer from a resulting dullness in their addressing the topics which makes history a real foot-slogging exercise for most Texas high school students. HRW offers significant additional products to help teachers — I made heavy use of the CD-ROM accompanying the text and especially its software to help generate tests. I found it necessary to use chunks from my extensive video library to supplement, and in critical areas for the Texas exit exam for seniors, the book did not inspire students to learn the material — for Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Japanese internment during World War II, Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, Vietnam and the Cold War, for example. These specific areas do not stand out in the book, not as I wish they would, and not in a way that the average kid would understand the issues.

History should sing. The study of history should inspire students, as patriots, as citizens, as parents and as humans interested in real drama. Dull books put the burden on teachers to make the history sing, and too few teachers are up to the task, especially in a world dominated by state-mandated teaching to a test (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS). I have a dream. I have high hopes that the Texas SBOE will make great new standards for English, standards that will lend themselves to helping teachers make the subject sing for the students so they will happily and well learn the topic.

I have a dream that this process will lead to a similar renaissance in U.S. history, and in biology, and in other topics. But I am dulled with the understanding of past history from the Texas SBOE.

Because Texas is a huge market for publishers, they will skew their books as Texas asks, often. You have a stake in the Texas curriculum regardless where you live. Watch that space!

4 Comments | Current History, History Revisionism, State school boards, TAKS, TEKS, Texas, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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